What started in 2009 as an exploratory project to bring student voices to reporting on international sustainability conferences is taking wings: Our Student Reporter programme becomes Pro Journo. Congratulations!
Student Reporter emerged from a cooperation between oikos and the Mercator Foundation Switzerland in 2009, bringing together 10 students as online reporters to the World Resources Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In 2011, two years and several reporting projects later, oikos PhD Fellow Tim Lehmann took the initiative to a next level and established Student Reporter as an ongoing oikos programme. Since then, he and his colleagues – in particular Sunmin Kim who joined the team in 2012 and became the programme’s managing editor in 2013 – developed the initiative from strength to strength: Student Reporter became an advocacy blogging platform and provided journalistic training to students around the world. It made young voices an integral part of conferences ranging from the Rio+20 Summit to the World Economic Forum. And it established partnerships with other media outlets such as the Huffington Post and started providing in-depth coverage on a whole series of topics.
Based on this strong momentum, Tim, Sunmin and their colleagues are now embarking on the next phase and have spun off Student Reporter into a new separate organization: Pro Journo – a social enterprise for young people interested in economic and business aspects of today’s toughest societal challenges. We are delighted to see what they have already achieved, and we wish Pro Journo all the best for the continuation of its impressive path!
